SANTA CRUZ >> The stakes are a little higher in Nehal Pfeiffer’s Harbor High School classroom.

Nehal Pfeiffer calls herself the CEO of a fictional company made up of her students and run like a Silicon Valley biotechnology laboratory, such as Thermo Fisher Scientific, where she worked before earning her teaching degree. The class “business” has its own website and is dubbed NTP Biolabs, a student’s idea because it is the initials for both Pfeiffer’s name and the DNA backbone molecule nucleoside triphosphate.

“I want them to fail and rise up. I treat this as if it’s a corporate experience,” Pfeiffer said. “They’re in charge of their own learning.”

In its third year, the first under Pfeiffer, the course is a hybrid of a science-business life skills learning, a window into what working in a biotechnology lab might actually look like. Grades are primarily calculated through a combination of practical quizzes, workbook content and self-assessment, said Pfeiffer, a Harbor High alumna.

During a recent Friday lab, white-coated students equally split between girls and boys, huddled in small groups above test tube samples as their peers used micropipettes to snag white globular masses. With advice frequently given and requested, the scientists-in-training transferred their own DNA strands, culled from cheek swabs, into small clear plastic beds. To get that point, the students had taken a variety of theoretical learning contained in advanced biology course books and actually applied it, Pfeiffer said. The experiment called for use of enzymes to break open the cells, a polymerase chain reaction machine to duplicate the DNA a billion times and gel electrophoresis boxes to filter apart different-length DNA strands. In the next lab, after Pfeiffer tagged DNA with special florescent markers, the students used specialized digital photography equipment to capture the images and determine if they had a specific type of longer or shorter gene.

“It’s not so much what the science is or the science behind it. They have to apply it,” Pfeiffer said. “It’s one thing to read about it, but they have to apply what do they know and what can they do about it.”

Mingling among them was the day’s lab volunteer, Muriel Kmet, who has a PhD in molecular, cell and development biology. Standing to the side, she noted the value of the students’ confusion and missteps.

“You see how disorganized they are? They will know next time to be ready before they go in,” Kmet said. “What’s going to be interesting for them when they start college, they can already get a job working in a lab. They can already have an entryway into the lab as an undergrad.”

The 26-student biotechnology class, a Regional Occupational Program course including sophomores, juniors and seniors, was first launched in 2012 as a countywide magnet class under the joint efforts of Jocelyn Formento a retired executive with biotech giant Genentech and Glenn Reed, a retired science teacher. The class, calling for prerequisites of algebra, geometry, biology and chemistry, is now limited to Harbor High students, has a sizeable waiting list, and has begun to change shape under Pfeiffer’s lead, observers say.

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Senior Stephanie Urbina, 17, said the class has helped cement her love of the sciences. Urbina, like her classmates, recently made it past the class’ midterm, in which underperforming students were eligible for being what Pfeiffer describes as “fired” from the class — asked not to return in the new year. The entire class performed well enough in the first half of the year to avoid such a situation, however.

“I was pretty nervous because you had to do your job. It gave you a sense of how the real world works,” Urbina said of the spectre of being fired. “It was nice to see how that pressure actually happens in real life. It was not so much about what your grade was, it was seeing how you actually work with people. Because you don’t get grades in your real life job – you get fired or you get promoted.”

At the beginning of the year, Pfeiffer gave each student a job assignment as project managers, resource managers, marketing and controllers for which they need to “apply” to change, with resumes and interviews. They can be “promoted” in both their assignments and grade levels, and must make marketing pitches to Pfeiffer with graphs and cost assessments for new experiments. Outside the classroom, the course’s cutting-edge equipment and supplies translate into one of the more expensive ROP classes to maintain and replicate in other schools, said the Santa Cruz County Office of Education’s ROP Director Mark Hodges. As funding responsibility for the ROP program fully shifts from county offices of education to local school districts statewide in coming years, Hodges said the future is uncertain for some courses.

“I am worried, but this particular course checks so many boxes for a school district,” Hodges said of his outlook for biotechnology. “It’s hands-on. It’s a science course. It meets high school graduation requirements. It meets minimum college admittance requirements. She’s preparing them for the workforce.”

Pfeiffer said her students are getting her four years of studying at UC Santa Cruz condensed into one year, serving as introduction to the many faceted biotechnology field.

“They respect the subject. It’s almost like I don’t exist. They want to know right now if they have that heterozygous DNA. If you give them enough background information so they truly understand it, they want to do it,” Pfeiffer said while her students delved into the day’s experiment. “It’s like the teacher has been removed. They have actually drank from the Kool-Aid of biotechnology, which is cool — which is what I want for my daughters.”

About the Author

Jessica A. York covers Santa Cruz government, water issues and homeless for the Sentinel. She has been a working journalist, on both coasts, since 2004. Reach the author at jyork@santacruzsentinel.com
or follow Jessica A. on Twitter: @reporterjess.